Climate Change: This Wild Plan Would Detonate a Nuclear Bomb on the Ocean Floor to “Save the Planet”

The climate warming we fuel every day through our consumption of fossil fuels now poses a serious threat to human survival. Solutions do exist. Most of them require effort, or at least some changes in how we approach the world. And ultimately, those changes might even be for the better.

That said, some people have little interest in truly changing their habits. Instead, they look for another way out, turning to large scale technologies that capture and store excess carbon dioxide CO2 from the atmosphere. In that context, a researcher from the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States has proposed a completely wild idea. At the heart of his project, which he himself calls ‘bold’, lies a nuclear explosion on the ocean floor.

Helping the ocean store more CO2

This is not the first time such an idea has surfaced. Back in the 1960s, Project Plowshare examined the effects a nuclear explosion might have on geological materials on the seabed. What Andy Haverly is suggesting here is that by pulverizing the basalt that makes up the ocean floor, such an explosion could speed up carbon sequestration through a process scientists call enhanced rock weathering, or ERW.

This calls for a bit of explanation. Scientists already know that the ocean captures a share of the CO2 present in the atmosphere, sequestering nearly 30 percent of the greenhouse gas we emit. One of the mechanisms behind this process involves alkaline rocks such as basalt on the seafloor. When these rocks come into contact with CO2 rich water, they dissolve. The CO2 then becomes part of limestone that remains stored at the bottom of the ocean.

Using enhanced rock weathering to remove CO2 from the atmosphere

This process caught researchers’ attention as early as the 1990s, when the climate crisis sparked renewed interest in ways to remove CO2 from the air. Today, experts believe that carbon capture and storage will be necessary if we hope to keep warming below an ‘acceptable’ threshold. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change even considers it ‘inevitable’. However, scientists worry that promises tied to these solutions could further weaken efforts to reduce and eventually bring greenhouse gas emissions down to net zero.

The idea behind enhanced rock weathering is to optimize the natural properties of basalt, for example, in order to accelerate geological CO2 storage. To do this, the rock must be crushed, increasing its surface area and therefore its ability to capture carbon. About a year ago, the Frontier coalition, a group of tech giants aiming to boost the carbon capture industry, announced a 57 million dollar investment to accelerate the development of enhanced rock weathering technologies.

A colossal nuclear explosion near Antarctica

With that context in mind, let us return to Andy Haverly’s proposal. The researcher explains how he calculated the power of a nuclear explosion capable of sequestering the equivalent of 30 years of CO2 emissions in basalt. The result is staggering: an explosion on the order of 81 gigatons of TNT. By comparison, the most powerful atomic bomb ever detonated did not exceed 50 megatons. That is roughly 1,000 times less than what Haverly is proposing. ‘This is not something to be taken lightly,’ he acknowledges.

Especially since other recent studies have already cast doubt on what accelerated rock weathering can realistically achieve. Researchers have identified several ‘traps’ linked to the geochemical and mineral composition of rock powders that may have led to an overestimation of the method’s effectiveness.

Still, Andy Haverly remains reassuring. According to his calculations, burying the nuclear device, a fairly standard hydrogen bomb, beneath the Kerguelen Plateau in the Southern Ocean, at a depth of between three and five kilometers within a basalt rich seabed and roughly six to eight kilometers below the ocean surface, would keep the explosion contained underwater. The basalt would absorb and trap most of the radiation locally.

What would be the fallout of such a nuclear explosion?

Most of the radiation? The researcher predicts ‘little to no loss of human life due to the immediate effects of radiation’. In the long term, he does acknowledge that the explosion would ‘have an impact on humans and lead to casualties’. However, according to Andy Haverly, this rise in radiation would amount to ‘a drop in the ocean’, given that ‘every year, we release more radiation from coal fired power plants and have already detonated more than 2,000 nuclear devices’. One more or one less, then, especially when climate change itself threatens at least 30 million lives by 2100.

The same reasoning is applied to the impact on ecosystems. What does a dozen square kilometers ‘wiped off the map’ represent compared to the biodiversity loss caused by global warming? Rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, habitat fragmentation or loss, acidification, extreme weather events, and shifts in seasonal cycles all point, in the researcher’s view, to the fact that climate change poses a far greater risk to the global ecosystem.

All that remains is to raise the 10 billion dollars needed to build the bomb and to set aside, purely for the good of humanity, of course, all nonproliferation treaties. With the promise of a return on investment, since the cost of climate change is now estimated at 100 trillion dollars. ‘At least from a financial standpoint, this is the most obvious path to follow,’ Andy Haverly concludes. From a financial standpoint.